Forget the Drones: Executive Plane Now an Afghanistan Flying Spy

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — With its rail-thin interior and the twin propellers flanking its nose cone like Salvador Dali’s mustache, the tiny MC-12 looks like it should be leisurely ferrying well-heeled passengers to the Vineyard. In the United States, this plane’s corporate cousins handle cushy jobs like that every day. But here in Afghanistan, this executive carrier has been turned into an unlikely spy — one of the U.S. forces’ most valuable intelligence assets, airmen say.

One of the things that makes it so valuable, and so seemingly unusual: There’s a pilot sitting in the cockpit. Armed Predator and Reaper drones have become the robotic face of the American air war here – able to stay in the air for a day at a time, and blast insurgents with hellfire missiles. The MC-12, on the other hand, has no firepower. It typically flies for a couple of hours at a time. And it’s not supposed to be a competitor to the drones, but rather a more tactical and collaborative supplement.

If the Predator gives ground commanders and intelligence analysts long-term viewing, for instance, the MC-12 gives ground units more and complementary options: a snapshot overview of a rapidly changing battlefield, right at the moment when information needs change, working in collaboration with the unit on the ground. Or, to use the mantra of Lt. Col. Douglas J. Lee, the commander of the Old Crows, the MC-12 squadron for the Bagram-based 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, “flexibility and responsiveness.” Welcome to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance with a human face – or, maybe, welcome back.

Lee, a serene 40-year-old pilot with 2000 flight hours under his belt, introduced Afghanistan to the MC-12 on Dec. 27, 2009, when he stood up the squadron, part of. Since then, his airmen have flown close to 2000 missions. Kandahar — Afghanistan’s other big air base — is now getting its own MC-12 crew.

I count ten of the twin-engine planes on Bagram’s runway, as Lee escorts me out. But that’s by no means a complete figure; there are probably many more. Inside, the MC-12 is too skinny to allow you to fully extend your arms from side to side. It’s a souped-up version of a C-12 Huron, King Air or Beechcraft passenger aircraft, a plane that the military has used since the ’70s. To put it more charitably, when Gates ordered the Air Force to rapidly get more spy planes downrange, the MC-12 was an “off the shelf” option, Briggs notes, procurable with relative ease and capable of getting outfitted with the latest surveillance tech. Suddenly airmen were looking at a familiar plane in new ways.

And these MC-12s are way tricked out. The passenger seating is gone, replaced with two stations for the operators of the plane’s intel gear – meaning the MC-12 is crewed by a team of only four people, including the pilot and co-pilot. Each station is outfitted with several monitors and a forest of black cables leading to unfamiliar gizmos. Just how the plane’s spy gear works is classified, as is a lot of basic information about the MC-12, including how high it flies. “We have full-motion video capabilities, as well as SIGINT [signals intelligence] capabilities,” is all Lee will say.

But that’s what gives the plane the “flexibility and responsiveness” that gives Lee and Briggs pride. To explain that requires a quick and somewhat meta point about drones.

Troops on the ground certainly make use of the broad overview that drones offer. But out on a mission, a ground commander might also need something more specific. He also might need to change his focus rapidly in order to get a better idea of what’s going on around him. That’s where the MC-12 comes in. Talking through forward Air Force liaisons riding with ground troops known as JTACs, the pilots and intel operators in the MC-12 work with ground forces to rapidly answer – and anticipate – commanders’ questions about what their area actually looks like, and collaborate with them when their information needs shift. The MC-12 incorporates intel gathered from the drones, supplementing and focusing it in a tactical way with the troops below.

The drones also have the capability to do that, of course, and they talk to ground troops through JTACs, too. But that’s where the human element comes in. As fast a transmission as a ground commander might have with a drone operator back in the U.S., with the MC-12, the loop can close more rapidly, as officers on the ground talk with pilots in the air to come up with a full tactical intelligence menu. When they need to switch courses, so to speak, they do so together. Indeed, Briggs notes, the airmen of the MC-12 eat at the same dining facilities as the soldiers back on base, forging a certain rapport. You can’t really do that with drone operators back in the States.

For instance: Airmen in the MC-12 might go from providing “IED overwatch to a route scan for a patrol to immediately providing overwatch for a ground assault or a helo assault,” Lee says. Or they might see some smoke coming from a position near the ground unit they’re supporting “and then look out a other aspects” of the battlespace to get a fuller picture of a fight that might change in an instant.

Briggs puts it a little differently — and hints at why he considers the MC-12 to be a “catastrophic success.” If a ground unit chasing an insurgent clears in on the compound he’s using for a hideout, that unit needs to know “which building he’s in and on which floor” he’s on to take him out. (USA Todaycredited intel from the MC-12 with taking down 20 insurgents in Afghanistan so far.)

And, as the cliché goes, in a counterinsurgency, the best weapons don’t necessarily shoot. The MC-12 also helps ground forces “identify where civilians are or are not,” Lee says, thereby helping minimize civilian casualties and targeting insurgents more precisely. Like drones and other intelligence assets, the MC-12 can help provide information on other key indicators of civilian life: Are kids attending schools? Are people shopping at markets? “It gives us a picture of normal as well as abnormal,” Lee notes – all as the planes fly over the ground units who need that information immediately.

Briggs and Lee aren’t the only ones who have faith in the MC-12. The Air Force announced late last month that Beale Air Force Base in California will be its preferred home location of the MC-12, an indicator that the platform is here to stay (although a permanent basing decision is still pending). And as Nathan Hodge previously reported for Danger Room, the MC-12 was at work in Iraq before flying eastward to Afghanistan.

And that helps give the Air Force something that many in the service want to see: a platform for the intel mission with a pilot in the cockpit. For his part, Lee considers the UAV-versus-manned debate to be too reductive. Much as “you don’t want an Air Force of all fighters or all tankers,” he says, he doesn’t consider manned and unmanned platforms as an either/or proposition. And in any case, he’s focused on his mission.

“I’m a firm believer in warfare as a human endeavor,” Lee says, all the while noting that drones have human operators as well. They’re just stationed thousands of miles from their aircraft. “It always boils down to human versus human.”